Moving Forward in Reverse

by Scott Martin

  You’re being stupid, was the last thing the know-it-all in my head said before I unlocked the door to the Soccer Office and shut the one on going back. I had to keep moving forward.

  With only five matches left in the season, I couldn’t afford to slow down now.

  ~~~

  The first match after my heart-palpitation scare was against Marquette, a Division I school. I had scheduled the match to prepare us for the homestretch and hopefully an invitation to the National Tournament. Perhaps I had been wrong to schedule such a difficult opponent, but our team was strong and training was as good as ever. We had to see how far we could go, otherwise what was the point?

  Marquette scored five goals on us. We scored none.

  Eight days later we had another away match, this time versus a Top 10 Division III university, Gustavus Adolphus. We managed to score a goal, but one wasn’t enough to compensate for the four they put on us. It was devastating. The result struck a blow to the team’s confidence that seemed irrecoverable. On the tail of twelve wins, two ties, and only three losses, we’d just lost two matches in a row. With only three more matches in the season, we couldn’t afford such casualties.

  I patted slouched backs and rounded shoulders as we loaded back onto the coach bus at the end of the Adolphus game.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I kept saying. ‘Two losses doesn’t mean it’s over. Keep your heads up! It’s not over.’ A few met my eyes and gave me a weak smile, some tried to carry on the torch of optimism, but all knew over was exactly what it was.

  I was shattered. Deflated. Lost and exhausted. As I glanced around at their sullen faces, I saw my own attitude reflected back at me.

  I did this, I thought, turning to stare out the window of the bus.

  Me. I’m responsible for their defeat.

  I had designed the schedule. It was most likely my outlook which they had taken on, the fear of losing the ground we had gained eventually eating them up. I had set the goal for us and I had failed to guide us to reaching it.

  ~~~

  Somehow, we managed to rally, pulling off a nine-to-one win against the University of Wisconsin at Platteville, immediately followed by a two-to-zero win against the University of Wisconsin at River Falls the next day. Both were Division III teams like us, and neither win would be enough to salvage our season. But at least we had rallied.

  Unfortunately, devastation wasn’t done tormenting me yet. The blows would kept coming, starting with my ‘bad foot’.

  After un-bandaging it the night of the River Falls match (with our last game of the season scheduled for the following day), I discovered that the infection had returned; that repugnant odor was back. The hole had also deepened so that now when I peered into it, I could see the pearly white of bone showing through the dark red meat of muscle. I stared at it with vacant eyes. How had this nightmare taken hold of me?

  I gradually released the foot and let it fall to the floor, leaned forward with my elbows on my thighs, and put my face in my hands. I recoiled. I had been looking for the comfort of warm, human flesh; instead my face landed in the cold rubber of the myos. Everything felt congested – constricted. It felt as if all the pressure I had been denying for so long suddenly piled into my skull, looking for release. I sighed, both weary and forlorn, then slowly made my way to the phone.

  Two weeks after our season came to a close with no invitation to the National Tournament, Tom took me to see Dr. Rucker. This time when he proposed surgery, I didn’t argue.

  ~~~

  ‘I need to dress you.’ she said.

  Damn! I thought and bit back a scowl. I was back to depending on others again.

  Thankfully there were crutches hanging off the edge of my bed. (I was sick of wheelchairs.)

  Once fully clothed, I took a crutch in each hand and situated them beneath my arms.

  Propelling the crutches in front of me, I leaned my weight into my arms and began to hop-hobble my way forward. As the downward pressure settled into the myos, the hands snapped open. The crutches careened out from under me as I tottered towards the floor. I crashed against the bed, relinquishing the right crutch to clatter to the floor in favor of stabilizing myself on the mattress. What the heck?

  When the surprise and disorientation had subsided, I reached tentatively for the fallen crutch. My brow pursed in consternation and distrust, I resituated myself for forward progress. I set the padded bottoms of the crutches on the floor in front of me, leaned onto the underarm supports, and began to lift my left foot – whoosh! The myos opened and the crutches propelled off course. I was better prepared this time and quickly pivoted so my butt landed on the padded gurney rather than the tile floor.

  Seriously?

  I flipped the remaining crutch out from under my left arm and watched it flop onto the floor with a dull thud. It was too perfect – too exactly how my life seemed destined to be. I couldn’t use crutches because apparently putting downward pressure on the myos would cause the muscles in my forearms to fire and the myos, in turn, to open.

  Damn it! Can nothing just work?

  I sat in contemplative frustration, glaring sourly at the useless crutches scattered on the floor by my feet until a nurse blew through the curtains with a gust of antiseptic-coated air, a wheelchair plowing in front of her.

  ‘Scott –’ she began, then forgot what she had been about to say as her eyes fell to the discarded crutches on the floor. ‘What in the world?’ Realization dawned and her demeanor turned patronizing and disapproving. ‘Scott, you were supposed to wait for a wheelchair. Hospital policy –’

  ‘Requires that patients leave in wheelchairs, I know.’ I waved the left myo at her and felt my back slump a little farther. ‘Doesn’t matter. I can’t use crutches with these things, anyway.’

  I waited for her to collect the crutches, muttering an apology I was still too bitter to make sound genuine, and obediently flopped into the seat of the chair when she wheeled it beside the bed.

  ‘There he is!’ Tom hollered when he saw me being steered in his direction. He was propped against a wall of the waiting room, a magazine spilling out of his left hand, and quickly straightened his posture and whipped the glossy pages shut. ‘How’d the surgery go?’

  ‘Fine. No complications except with the damn crutches.’ I replied.

  ‘Yeah, well, those things can be a real pain,’ he offered amicably.

  Tom took over steering my chair. He took me out to his car where he had to pull me up to the passenger side so I could pivot off my left foot to get in. The wheelchair had to be left at the hospital. No chair meant I would have to hop all the way to the apartment. When we arrived at the staff parking lot outside Towers Hall, I looked despondently at the walk – excuse me: hop that lay ahead.

  ‘Ready to do this?’ I asked when I’d swung myself from the car. Tom had walked around to the passenger side to meet me and gazed at my proffered right arm briefly. My thinking: use Tom as a human crutch and jounce my way single-footed to the apartment. Tom’s thinking: jouncing takes too long.

  He approached my side, slid under my right arm and in one quick swoop hoisted me into his arms.

  ‘Oh!’ I exclaimed. I cleared my throat and repeated, ‘Oh,’ this time a few octaves lower.

  ‘Don’t go thinking that you’re Debra Winger and I’m Richard Gere,’ he said, referring, I knew, to the famous scene from An Officer and a Gentleman. I grinned and buried my face against his neck in mock-Debra Winger style. When I heard voices nearby, I quickly turned away, but the grin stayed put.

  Tom stood me at the door of my apartment so I could pinch open and remove the key ring from my belt loop. (I couldn’t use the pockets of my pants anymore.) With his shoulder stooped low for support, I hopped my way over the threshold and to the nearest seat I could find.

  ‘Thank you for your assistance, Officer Peck,’ I said with a lopsided grin from the comfort of my sofa.

  ‘Har-har,’ Tom responded as he looked around my apartment. After a moment of
watching him scan the area, I sighed.

  ‘Looking for something?’ I asked.

  ‘Just noticing. There isn’t a lot of space around here, is there?’

  ‘Thinking about a wheelchair, huh? No, there’s no way.’

  My solution was to spend the month-long duration of my recovery moving about the apartment on my knees. My knees became scuffed, then scraped, and finally scabbed over, but nothing was more painful than having to rely on others for my shopping needs. I was right back where I had started when they released me from the hospital, only this time I couldn’t even drive with them to the stores. Instead, I had to pass lists and money to sympathetic recipients and ashamedly send them off to see to my needs.

  Before the illness, I had never realized – or never taken the time to consider – how important independence is to one’s wellbeing. Each time I lost my foothold on another aspect of my freedom, I slid lower. This time was like being robbed of everything I had worked for in the past two decades: all the hours spent coaching, working my way up the ladder; the endless days spent out on the field perfecting my own game and then my players’ technique; the time spent trying to devise the perfect season and then holding my breath on the sidelines as we fought our way through. As I crawled about on my knees that month, I felt the density of The Fog beginning to swell and grow. I was barely present during most days and during the rare moments when I wasn’t completely detached, bleakness dampened my thoughts.

  After a while I stopped fighting the dank Fog in my mind, and allowed it to be my shield until my foot finally healed. It was either that or spend the next month in a torturous spiral of anger, misery, and melancholy. I could survive the healing process, but I wasn’t sure if I could survive the torture of being cooped up with the thoughts circling in my head. I had grown good at stuffing my emotions into tight, dark corners over the past few months. I could do it for one more. Then, when my foot finally healed, I’d reemerge and return to my old self once more.

  And things may have indeed worked out that way had they not gone so awry.

  ~~~

  Two days I’d been back on my feet. I had just made my first grocery run since the surgery and was finally beginning to put it all behind me when I was called in for a meeting with Chuck in the Housing Office. Rumors had been circling about Housing wanting to split from Athletics, so I had a pretty good idea of what this meeting was about.

  At nine a.m. on the week of finals, I gritted my teeth, squared my shoulders and prepared to meet the Army Reserve Colonel and current Director of Housing at UW-Eau Claire.

  Chuck had a great mustache. Thick and white, it spread across his upper lip in a nice, even line. The bald crown of his head reflected the light in his office and his wide, clear-framed glasses magnified his eyes ever so slightly.

  Chuck’s office boasted floor-to-ceiling bookshelves along one wall, a solitary painting on the opposite wall, and two wooden-framed chairs in front of his expansive desk.

  When I came in, he stood to greet me and we exchanged ‘Good morning’s’. I took a seat in one of the chairs and settled in for the news which had brought me here.

  ‘I respect what you’ve gone through, Scott,’ he began. I acknowledged his comment with an appreciative nod, but stayed silent. More was coming and, knowing Chuck, I had a good idea it was going to be in the form of a question rather than a statement.

  I had no problem with Chuck. I coached his oldest son and his wife was an active parent in the team. He ran a tight department and I respected that as well. The fact that he was about to disrupt my fragile peace of mind didn’t change my opinion of him as a man. It was inevitable.

  ‘Do you believe that you are providing the time needed to perform your Housing duties appropriately?’

  That was it: he lay the weight of what we both knew to be the root cause of my summons on my shoulders with expert care. I knew the answer. I also liked to believe that Chuck respected me, too, and knew I would speak truthfully

  ‘No, sir,’ I said, feeling like one of the Privates who must have sat opposite this same man in prior years and been asked their own difficult questions. I didn’t tack on a ‘but’ or try to come to my defense on the matter. There was nothing else to say. I had been overwhelmingly playing favorites among my two roles, with the soccer program taking priority by far and wide. This meeting was my doing and I was prepared for what was to come.

  Chuck nodded slowly, then leaned onto his elbows and said, ‘I’ll keep you through the end of the academic year and offer you a contract for the summer.’

  I gazed at him a little incredulously. He didn’t have to give me a job over the summer. Of course, without it I would have had nothing.

  ‘Thank you for the offer,’ I said, then stood and held out the right myo. As we shook hands I looked him in the eye, hoping he could glimpse the depths of my gratitude and the sincere esteem I had for him as a man and a boss. After replacing the chair in its original position, I left for the Soccer Office.

  16

  Time for Some Answers

  No matter how many times I recalculated, the numbers wouldn’t budge. Marilyn Skrivseth, the Athletic Director who hired me almost two years before, had said that I would receive a modest increase in my pay from coaching to help compensate for the loss of the Housing contract. It wouldn’t be enough to fully make up the difference, she admitted, but it would be something.

  When the increase came through, I sat down to do the math and determine what I could afford in terms of housing. Along with losing half my paycheck, no longer being a part of the Housing Department staff meant I would also lose my on-campus apartment in Towers Hall. Man, it would be tight. After another round of crunching the numbers, I finally surrendered to the bitter facts. My only consolation was that I had until the end of summer to find a place that would suit my modest needs and even more modest budget.

  It never crossed my mind to look for another coaching position. I simply took the changes to my contract with UW Eau Claire as new constrictions to my life. I was used to limitations, after all.

  I continued to work as I had before, putting more time into my housing position like the last runner of a relay whose team has already been disqualified. I knew nothing I did now would be enough, but for whatever time was left, I figured I might as well try to show my appreciation for Chuck’s generosity.

  The days plodded along. I shuffled from office to office to the soccer field without much thought to anything at all. If I had any morale left, it wasn’t enough to show. Hope for the future, eager anticipation, excitement were all things of the past. I felt as if I had just turned onto Route 66 and all that was left to do was settle in for a long, bleak ride.

  There was only one diversion I had taken to, and it wasn’t much help in bolstering my view. The events of Scott Savrsnik’s visit had been hovering in my mind since the day he visited. I was continually rolling the events of our encounter around in my head, trying to figure out what to make of the incident. There was one thing above all else that I couldn’t shake from my thoughts: after some of the shock had worn off, the first thing he’d asked me was how I had contracted the bacteria.

  This wasn’t a new concept by any means. I had wondered the same thing myself, but as with most difficult questions, had put it out of my mind in favor of more progress-promoting undertakings. My focus had always been on moving forward, returning to the team, recovery, but with all the set-backs I’d been experiencing and now Scott’s comment, a new question was forming. One persistent, which didn’t want to be dismissed: Why?

  Why had this happened? Both the injustice-of-fate why and the physical, what-did-I-do-wrong why wrapped their nettled coils around my neck and squeezed until I could take their suffocating presence no longer. I started dropping by the campus library and scavenging for any books I could find on Group A Streptococcus, or ‘my disease’. At first, most of what I learned was a parody of what Dr. Henrickson had told me in the hospital:

  Group A Streptococcus (GAS)
, referred to as toxic shock-like syndrome by physicians because the symptoms often resemble those of toxic shock. Although most commonly known as the cause of strep throat and impetigo, it could turn invasive if able to infect the blood, muscle, fat tissue, or lungs.

  I poured over page after page, stooped beneath the florescent lights in the reference section of the library. With an incubation period of only one to three days, the books said, the disease progresses quickly and has the capacity to cause a great deal of harm in a short amount of time. I experienced the potency of that fact first-hand when my illness turned from flu-like symptoms and fatigue into all-out war and multiple organ failure in the span of forty-eight hours.

  I also came across an article which described a 30-year-old woman in Canada who reported a sudden onset of nausea, vomiting, and lethargy (symptoms which sounded all too familiar) one day and was subsequently taken to the hospital, She died ten hours later, unable to be saved by the massive doses of antibiotics administered to her.

  Ten hours, I thought and winced. From sick to dead in ten measly hours. Shaking my head, I hastily set the article aside and turned back to the nearest book.

  The flesh-eating disease is also known for the speed with which it attacks and kills infected flesh, the book said, spreading as fast as three centimeters per hour. During my fight with the disease, my family noticed my skin progressively blacken by the hour as the bacteria attacked the living tissue of my hands and feet. For reasons unknown, in its invasive form, the GAS bacteria become unusually aggressive and release a toxin which irreparably destroys the tissue, causing it to become gangrenous and morph into necrotizing fasciitis, or “the flesh-eating disease." Surgical removal of the dead flesh is almost always necessary to prevent the infection from spreading further and becoming fatal.